Luxury Ingredients: The Most Expensive Food You Can Buy

We're in a recession? Could have fooled us with these extravagant ingredients still on the market finding buyers. From gourmet mushrooms to labor-intensive spices and pork infused with Spanish mountain air, check out our list of the 12 most expensive ingredients available right now.

Kopi Luwak

starting at $300 per pound

Kopi Luwak is known as the world's rarest, smoothest, most flavorful, and most expensive coffee. Only 500 pounds of these beans are produced each year on the Indonesian Island of Sumatra, and it's no easy feat. First, consider how it's produced: Coffee grows as a seed inside a fruit similar to a cherry. The Palm Civet  a smallish, carnivorous forager that looks like a tropical raccoon  looks for the sweetest coffee cherries to swallow whole. The animal digests the fruit only, and the undigested coffee beans pass through. Then the beans are collected, cleaned, and roasted like regular beans.

Palm Civets have unique natural enzymes in their bellies that penetrate the coffee beans and cause 25 otherwise unreachable flavors in the bean to be released during brewing, while simultaneously neutralizing the coffee's bitter oils. Who wouldn't want to wake up to that?